“Leadwise” principle is a word, and words are used in different ways by different speakers.
The idea of humane character is near to the way in which Aristotle described the good and proper function of human life as an activity of the soul that expresses genuine virtue or excellence. According to Aristotle, wisdom requires intuition and ‘scientific’ knowledge. Defining intuition is tricky as there is a slightly mystical dimension to it. Cognitive psychologist, Gary Klein, resists the idea of there being any magical properties to intuition – he says that intuition is the way we translate our experience into action. Hunches, he says, are simply associations and connections rather than anything more visceral. But Klein’s research leads him to believe that “many business intuitions and expertise are going to be valuable; they are telling you something useful, and you want to take advantage of them.”
Intuitive instincts require checking wherever possible – primarily with known data points and knowledge using our rational capability. Being aware of the limits of one’s prejudices and expertise is also part of the rational balance to intuitive judgements. But in the twenty-first century we have observed a greater willingness to recognise that intuition and our sense of self is not fully explained by cerebral reason or ‘scientific’ knowledge alone. Science can only measure outward behaviour not what people refer to as ‘gut instinct’. A number of psychologists have tried to construct psychological models and psychometric measures to identify ‘wisdom-related performance’ and the relationship of wisdom with intelligence, personality and age. Even some neurobiologists are showing interest in the potential clinical significance of wisdom for rehabilitative interventions. But we are also witnessing a push-back against a ‘scientism’ that relies on what Professor Raymond Tallis calls “Neuromania and Darwinitis”. Tallis has recently written that “to seek the fabric of contemporary humanity inside the brain is as mistaken as to try to detect the sound of a gust passing through a billion-leaved wood by applying a stethoscope to isolated seeds.” The current interest in meditative, mindful and spiritual practices is an example of how we continue our search for humanity and the humane in spheres beyond biological and neuroscientific explanation.
However we might explain the place of intuition, it arises in the context of wisdom studies. In a hallmark study of wisdom and leadership, McKenna, Rooney and Boal explain the intuitive capacity of wise leaders as encompassing experience, self-understanding and a metaphysical quality. Wise leaders, they say acknowledge “the sensory and visceral as important components of decision-making and judgment…that does not bind them absolutely to the rules of reason thereby enabling vision, insight and foresight.” Wise leaders are self aware, aware of their prejudices, their social conditioning and thus able to moderate the tendency to be over-optimistic with their intuitive instincts. But also they have learned to value intuition, having learnt to use it well in combination with their rational capability and experience.
It isn’t easy to lead with practical wisdom. A phronetic leader must make judgments and take actions amid constant flux. And he or she must do so while taking a higher point of view—what’s good for society—even though that view stems from individual values and principles. Our research over the past decade shows that to lead in this fashion, six abilities are essential. We will describe them in the following pages and offer suggestions on how to develop those skills.
Phronetic leaders practice moral discernment about what’s good and act on it in every situation. Don’t get us wrong—maximizing shareholder wealth can lead to goodness, as can making a profit. But these leaders set their sights higher: They believe that their actions should have a moral purpose akin to what Max Weber had in mind when he linked Protestantism to capitalism.
According to Akio Matsubara, the former head of human resources at Toyota, Eiji Toyoda, the company’s former president, always said, “To do what you believe is right. To do what you believe is good. Doing the right things, when required, is a calling from on high. Do it boldly, do as you believe, do as you are.”
Judgments must be guided by the individual’s values and ethics. Without a foundation of values, executives can’t decide what is good or bad. His values spur Shoei Utsuda, the chairman of Mitsui & Co., to ask before making any decision, “Is what I am attempting to do good quality work (yoi shigoto) for the company and society?” Values have to be one’s own; they can’t be borrowed. That’s why the question most frequently asked at Honda is “What do you think?” It encourages employees to reflect deeply about their own values in relation to those of Honda and society.
Managers must make judgments for the common good, not for profits or competitive advantage. Says Tadashi Yanai, the CEO of Fast Retailing, which owns Japan’s fastest-growing apparel brand, Uniqlo, “Not only does a company have to live in harmony with society, but to be accepted, it must contribute to society. The majority of companies that have failed did not maintain that balance. Everyone is, first, a member of society before one of the company. Thinking only about the company will undoubtedly result in failure.”
There are four ways of cultivating the ability to make judgments about goodness. One is experience, particularly that gained by facing adversity or failure. Yanai constantly reminds himself and others of the challenges he overcame—operating a single store way out in the country, being refused a bank loan, being pushed around by powerful wholesalers, facing near bankruptcy on numerous occasions. Yanai is so proud of having made mistakes that he called his first book One Win, Nine Losses.
Another way is to write down principles drawn from life experiences and share them. Over the years, Yanai has developed 23 principles, which he calls the “soul” of his company. “Without a soul, a company or a person is nothing more than an empty shell,” he says. Several of his canons address goodness head-on: Put good ideas into practice, move the world, change society, and contribute to society. Reward good conduct and punish evildoing. Demand the highest level of ethics in your business and work. A third method is the relentless pursuit of excellence. That helps CEOs realize what’s worthwhile—what’s worth desiring and striving for—in a specific situation. Utsuda told us that he once served as an assistant to Mitsui’s former president Tatsuzo Mizukami, who revived the company after World War II: “He had already turned 80 when I worked for him. I was amazed at the standards of excellence he pursued. Never once did he cut corners.”
Finally, judgment can be cultivated by becoming well versed in the liberal arts, such as philosophy, history, literature, and the fine arts. Management is a liberal art, as Peter Drucker said; liberal because it deals with the fundamentals of knowledge, self-knowledge, wisdom, and leadership; art because it is also about practice and application. To follow through on what we preach, a few years ago we launched a senior executive program in Tokyo (see the sidebar “Teaching Integrity in the Classroom”) whose core curriculum consists of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Heidegger, and other classics.
Before making judgment calls, wise leaders quickly sense what lies behind a situation, project a vision of the future or the consequences, and decide on the action needed to realize that vision. Practical wisdom enables them to see the essence and intuitively fathom the nature and meaning of people, things, and events.
A telling example of how Soichiro Honda, the founder of the company that bears his name, did that is visible in a photograph hanging at the Automotive Hall of Fame in Dearborn, Michigan. It shows him at a motorcycle-racing track, crouching down low to put himself at eye level with a rider passing at full speed. Honda has his hands on the ground to feel the vibration and his ears cocked to absorb the sound of the engine. That’s how he captured the essence of the motorcycle. “When I look at a motorcycle, I see many things,” he used to tell his successors. “I see I should do such and such to maneuver past the curve. I think about the next-generation machine. I think, if I do this, it will have more speed. I move naturally into the next process.” Grasping the essence requires attention to detail and persistence. “If you are going to do something, you must do it relentlessly,” Yanai says. “Do what is 100% right, concentrate on small things, and continue going back to basics. Unless you do that, you cannot move to the next stage. The secret to success is doing the basics day in and day out.”
It’s also important that leaders grasp universal truths from the particulars and the details. Expanding particulars into universals requires continual interaction between subjective intuition and objective knowledge. Ratan Tata, the chairman of the Tata Group, conceived the idea of a $2,500 car in this way. In the now famous story, he noticed an entire family—father, mother, and children—on a scooter, snaking dangerously around cars on a rainy day in Mumbai. He knew that the cheapest car cost five times as much as a scooter did and that families near the bottom of the income pyramid couldn’t afford one. Tata realized, right there and then, that those people would buy cars if his company produced them at a price they could afford.
To cultivate their ability to grasp the essence of a problem, executives should practice three mind-stretching routines. The first is relentlessly asking what the basis of a problem or a situation is. At Toyota employees ask “Why?” five times to get to the root cause. At Honda they ask the “A, A0, and A00” questions. A questions are about specifications—such as “What should the horsepower of this engine be?” A0 questions are about concepts—such as “What is the idea behind this engine?” A00 questions are about the essential goals of the project—such as “What is this engine for?”
The second routine is learning to see the trees and the forest at the same time. In the words of Toshifumi Suzuki, Seven-Eleven Japan’s chairman, “It isn’t good if you just see a tree, not the forest. Many wrongly think that single-item management means managing a single item. But it’s necessary to place the item in the store as a whole.” God may live in the details, but leaders should never forget the big picture.
The third entails constructing and testing hypotheses. For example, the employees in every Seven-Eleven Japan store—including high school students and homemakers who work part-time—decide what merchandise to order. Because each store caters to different customers and faces different situations at different times, employees cannot rely on rules set by headquarters. Nor can they mechanically fill shelves by ordering the same amounts of the same things each day. Every time a staff member places an order, she is encouraged to build a hypothesis about what customers want. When ordering beverages, for example, she must rely on her knowledge of local customers’ needs and also take into account factors such as the weather, school schedules, local festivals, power shutdowns, and so on.
Phronetic leaders constantly create opportunities for senior executives and employees to learn from one another. In Japan a ba (place, space, or field) refers to the context in which relationships are forged and interactions occur. Those participating in a ba share information, build short-term relationships, and try to create new meaning. For example, an informal ba may take place at a bar or a pub, where strangers talk casually about their immediate concerns or problems, sometimes triggering insights or solutions.
In a more formal or organizational setting, a ba permits participants with a shared sense of purpose to interact closely. Each member sees himself in relation to others and tries to understand their views and values subjectively. Membership is voluntary. In that sense, a ba is a shared context in motion, with participants coming and going, relationships changing, and contexts shifting over time.
Honda’s waigaya (short for the onomatopoeic waiwai-gayagaya, which imitates the hum created by people’s voices when they meet) is also a ba. As many as 30 members of a project team will get together for three days and nights at a hotel or ryokan (inn) with a hot springs. In the evenings they drink sake and visit the communal bath. Although there is no agenda, people typically begin by bad-mouthing their bosses and sharing frustrations. As the members start spilling their guts over sake, it isn’t unusual for fights, verbal or even physical, to break out. On the second day, barriers start to melt as people begin to understand one another’s motivations and feelings. They become more willing to listen and empathize. By the third day, they’ve often made an inductive leap, overcoming their personal issues and arriving at a team-based view about how to solve a problem.
Companies can set up a ba in any number of ways: in project meetings, training programs, ad hoc study groups, informal hobby groups, conferences, company-sponsored family or sports events, smoking rooms, cafés and canteens, virtual meetings, intranet systems, and blogs. A ba can be top-down or bottom-up. The CEO should initiate the former kind. Five months after Utsuda became Mitsui’s president, in 2002, he started a kurumaza (sitting in a circle) meeting that took place once or twice a month during lunch or after work. It was open to any employee who registered on the company intranet and wanted to discuss the meaning of good-quality work for employees, the company, and society. Over six years, 117 meetings involving 2,000 employees took place. The participants reviewed Mitsui’s past business practices—some of which were controversial, owing to compliance issues in foreign countries—and future aspirations.
A bottom-up ba, which companies outside Japan may find easier to use, gives employees firsthand experience of how consumers use products and services. Eisai, known for having developed medicines to treat dementia, sends all its researchers to take care of patients. The employees learn how patients behave, take medicines, bathe, and communicate with caregivers. They gain a deeper understanding of the needs of patients and their families—and of the company’s mission of human health care as articulated by Haruo Naito, Eisai’s president. One employee told us, “I was completely focused on the development of medicines, but at the hospital, the focus was not on medicines. Drugs are only useful in certain situations. The training gave me fresh awareness of the purpose of drugs and how we should develop them.”
Phronetic leaders must be able to communicate in a way that everyone can understand. The essence of a situation is often hard to express, so they must use stories, metaphors, and other figurative language. That allows individuals grounded in different contexts and with different experiences to grasp things intuitively.
A metaphor provides a way of understanding one thing by envisioning another. Yanai is fond of using sports metaphors and analogies to get his point across. One of his favorites is “In baseball, teams with a large number of stolen bases have a high number of attempted steals. You can’t run if you’re thinking only about not being tagged. The same could be said of management.” Metaphors also convey messages in ways that capture the imagination. For example, Toyota likens the automobile industry—and, by extension, the company itself—to a green tomato, incomplete and growing.
A story can help us gain self-knowledge through the experiences of the protagonist or the antagonist. It can also explain the historical context (“How has this come to be?”) and communicate future scenarios (“What is it going to look like?”). At Mitsui, storytelling became an important part of the review process under Utsuda. In 2002 he changed the corporate performance criteria, putting much more emphasis (80%) on qualitative than on quantitative results. The process for achieving results thus became more important than revenues or profits. Utsuda encouraged all employees to tell a story at their annual review about why a goal was important to them and the company, how it aligned with their values as well as the company’s, and what good it would do them and the company in the future. The process of creating, telling, and sharing stories was instrumental in changing Mitsui’s culture. It led employees to sell their ideas more persuasively and made them think about the quality of the work they would do before calculating the profits. Fujio Mitarai, Canon’s chairman, has institutionalized a similar process. He asks everyone to submit an annual business plan with a story. He kicks off the process by writing a story about how the company can achieve the numerical goals he has established. That trickles down through senior managers and middle managers to all employees. Everyone at Canon has to back up the numbers with a narrative. “That’s how skills are cultivated and our people grow,” Mitarai explains. “It forms the foundation of Canon’s strength.”
To use metaphors and stories effectively, leaders must learn to see the relationship between one thing and another, between themselves and someone else, or between the present and either the past or the future. The best way to do that is to read as many novels as possible in all genres, including romance, satire, comedy, and tragedy, and to attend the theater.
Rhetoric counts, because effective communicators touch people’s hearts and minds. Think of speeches that have done both, such as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 and Steve Jobs’s “Stay hungry, stay foolish” commencement address at Stanford University in 2005. Both were based on personal experience; had a beginning, a middle, and an end; and repeated the key message several times. King said “I have a dream” eight times and “Let freedom ring” 10 times in the last five minutes of his 17-minute speech. Jobs repeated the phrase “Stay hungry, stay foolish” three times in the last 20 seconds of his 15-minute address.
Wise leaders engage in conversation with as many people as possible and display a high degree of commitment to communication. Yanai articulated his “dream” for 2020 on January 1, 2009: to become the world’s number one apparel retailer in terms of sales and profitability, surpassing Gap, Zara, and H&M. Over the next three months he engaged in a weekly 90-minute dialogue with half a dozen of his top executives in Tokyo to discuss the people, organization, and systems needed to realize that dream. He spent the same amount of time in similar meetings with another group of top executives from Shanghai, Seoul, Paris, London, and New York. He plans to carry on these dialogues with 200 of his future leaders, meeting them face-to-face all over the world in the next three years. Communication is critical to bringing dreams to life.
It isn’t enough to identify the essence or communicate it; phronetic leaders must bring people together and spur them to act, combining and synthesizing everyone’s knowledge and efforts in the single-minded pursuit of their goals. To mobilize people, executives must utilize all the means—including Machiavellian ones—suited to the situation. Shrewdness and stubbornness are often necessary to create something new and good.
Wise leaders exercise political judgment by understanding the viewpoints and emotions of others, gleaned through everyday verbal and nonverbal communication. They carefully consider timing—when to make a move or to discuss issues. No one we know exercises these qualities with more passion than Toshiba’s chairman, Atsutoshi Nishida, who is a scholar of intersubjectivity—a field of phenomenology pioneered by Edmund Husserl. Nishida firmly believes that people are by nature both logical and emotional, so he stresses the importance of empathizing with others to develop genuine dialogues with them. It isn’t unusual for him to engage in discussions with his colleagues that run twice the allotted time.
“Concentrate on small things, and continue going back to basics. Unless you do that, you cannot move to the next stage.” –Tadashi Yanai, Fast Retailing
Phronetic leaders also strive to understand all the contradictions in human nature—good and bad, civility and incivility, optimism and pessimism, diligence and laziness—and synthesize them as situations arise. Rather than seeking an optimal balance between contradictions, they engage in dialectical thinking, which enables them to deal with contradictions, opposites, and paradoxes by moving to a higher level. Some use the German word aufheben to describe this process. By thinking in terms of “both and” rather than “either or,” phronetic leaders can make the decision best suited to a situation without losing sight of the goodness to be achieved. As F. Scott Fitzgerald pointed out, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” In this age of discontinuity, these qualities matter more than ever.
Imagination and vision are key to rising to a higher level. For instance, Yanai has announced that Fast Retailing will need 200 next-generation leaders to bring about his vision for the company. He has used dialectics to identify the starting point—namely, the composition of the leadership pool. Half the future leaders will be Japanese, half will come from current employees, half will be geniuses (and the other half will be ordinary folks). Yanai wants them to transcend all the dichotomies and turn into globally minded business owners. His leaders must be both asura (demon) and Buddha: They must become tyrannical perfectionists who understand both the bad and the good in human nature. Interestingly, demoting leaders can help them understand other viewpoints and emotions. This technique works especially well in Japan, and nobody uses it more than Fast Retailing. More than half the company’s senior executives have been demoted, which involves a 25% pay cut and sends a clear message that a particular judgment, decision, or action didn’t work. The executives are given another chance to excel. One of them, who has experienced two demotions, says, “Sure, it hurts both economically and psychologically. But the demotions made me tougher. I now have the stomach to give my subordinates the kind of feedback I received.”
Forgetting success is also effective in spurring people to do better. Yanai recently warned his team that doing the same thing year after year is synonymous with falling behind. The title of a book he wrote in 2009, Throw Away Your Success in One Day, shows how quickly he thinks companies must reinvent themselves.
Practical wisdom should never be treated as if it were the preserve of the company’s chief executive or top management team. It must be distributed as much as possible through the organization, and employees at all levels can be trained in its use. Fostering distributed leadership is therefore one of the wise leader’s biggest responsibilities. For instance, in the 1970s Soichiro Honda gained some practical wisdom from his subordinates when Honda was developing a low-emissions automobile engine. He declared that the new engine would put the company in a position to beat the “Big Three” automakers in the United States, who were then opposing the Clean Air Act. Honda’s engineers objected, saying that they were developing the engine in order to fulfill social responsibilities. They were doing it for their children, they said. The story goes that Honda was so ashamed of himself when he heard this that he decided it was time to retire.
Fostering distributed phronesis will enable organizations to respond flexibly and creatively to any situation. One structural option is to use the “scrum” approach (see our article “The New New Product Development Game,” HBR January–February 1986) to stay agile. The rugby metaphor, first used in the manufacturing industry, is today the official name of the agile software development process. Although individual teams are usually limited to seven members, the number of teams rises as the scope of the project grows. The development process stops at two-week intervals, when members form a scrum (a “huddle” in American football) to make judgments on how to complete unfinished tasks. It’s possible to have hundreds of scrum masters and thousands of members working, learning, and making wise decisions concurrently.
Even part-time workers should be able to use phronesis, according to Seven-Eleven Japan’s Suzuki. “I have only two eyes and one mind,” he argues. “There are several thousand part-time workers in our stores. If everyone can make a judgment on his or her own, we will have quite a few more eyes and minds.”
People can often learn about practical wisdom by observing an exemplar’s behavior. At Honda the company’s founder is still the dominant exemplar. Takeo Fukui, a former company president, told us, “It is important for Honda to create many Soichiro Hondas.” That doesn’t mean Honda workers should imitate the founder; the situations they face are often different from those he faced when he was alive. Rather, it means that when a judgment call is necessary, a worker should ask himself or herself: “If I were Soichiro Honda, what would I do?”
Exemplars can frequently be found among middle managers. Consider Honda’s large-project leaders, who undertake work of strategic importance but have no hierarchical authority or personnel selection power. They work with as many as 200 of their colleagues at a time in design, engineering, testing, marketing, and other fields. Those colleagues all volunteer mainly because of the leader’s character. An exemplar enables ordinary people to perform in extraordinary ways.
Another method of fostering practical wisdom is to use a formal system of apprenticeship, which allows mentors to share experiences, contexts, and time. At Fast Retailing, for instance, Yanai serves as the mentor for 200 apprentices all over the world. He assigns them projects in three areas—product development, store operations, and administration (finance, human resources, IT, and legal)—and asks them to implement ideas that will change the status quo. Each project lasts about six months; apprentices work for 18 months on these jet-set projects, as employees call them, while maintaining their regular jobs. Yanai must personally evaluate the results of 600 change projects in a timely fashion, and in the process he helps create the next generation of wise leaders for the company.
We believe, must metamorphose today into the wisdom-practicing company of tomorrow. That demands a new kind of leader—a CEO who is many things at the same time:
[For the record: Ikujiro Nonaka is on the board of directors of Mitsui & Co. and Seven & I Holdings, and was on the board of Eisai until 2009. He is also an adviser to Canon. Hirotaka Takeuchi is a personal adviser to Fast Retailing’s Tadashi Yanai.]
Management has often been regarded as a fact-based scientific approach and managerial decision-making requires knowledge (technical expertise, data, facts) and a rational approach. We asked our respondents if, in their experience, they could describe how wisdom might add something more to the decision making process.
Finding, keeping and developing great people isn’t easy, but finding, keeping and developing great managers is even harder. What employees and employers expect of managers has changed drastically in recent times. With new styles of management required, we need to revisit what we expect of managers and how we develop them to be their best.
Google’s Michelle Donovan, Director of People Operations, posed the question: What if everyone at Google had an amazing manager? So Google embarked on a new project to understand what that would look like. Project Oxygen was named in line with a trend of borrowing names from the periodic table. Donovan thought it was apt, “Having a good manager is essential, like breathing. And if we make managers better, it would be like a breath of fresh air,” she said as quoted in the book Work Rules. Google first identified the best and worst managers. They discovered that the teams who worked for the best managers were significantly more certain that:
In order to learn what good managers were doing that made them successful, Google conducted double-blind interviews with managers about their style using the same set of questions. From the interviews, Google identified eight common traits of high-scoring managers. Eight common traits of high-scoring managers
How Culture Amp identified the most common traits of successful managers Project Oxygen identified the core behaviors of good managers at Google. You’ll see they’re not particularly surprising (Google was similarly underwhelmed by their findings). In looking at the traits of effective managers, our data and insights team at Culture Amp took things one step further. They conducted research with customers and reviewed current academic and practitioner research. Three more behaviors were identified: A manager’s ability to lead through change (emotional resilience) Treat employees fairly and encourage diversity (fair treatment) Focus on progress, not just results (overall effectiveness). As a result, we’ve settled on the 11 traits of great managers.
The 11 traits of great managers
Managers who are caring take time to get to know the individuals in their team. They’re genuinely interested in people’s success and personal well-being and show this by regularly checking in with people on how they’re going both at work and outside work. I’d consider speaking with my manager if I was thinking about leaving.
Managers who are good coaches focus on developing the people they work with as well as getting the job done. They ensure they have regular one-on-one meetings with team members and encourage them to present solutions to problems, rather than solving problems for them. I regularly get feedback from my manager that I can put to use.
Managers who are great communicators are good listeners. They allow time for others to speak. They have a clear understanding of the organization’s vision and share it with the people in their team in a way that motivates them. They keep their team up-to-date on what’s happening in the organization. My manager communicates a vision that motivates me.
Managers who show a genuine interest in employees’ career development acknowledge improvement (not just deliverables). They take time to discuss people’s long-term career aspirations and help them understand potential career paths at and outside the organization. My manager frequently recognizes progress I make, not just results.
How a manager behaves in challenging circumstances can have a significant impact on their team. Managers who are emotionally resilient are aware of how their mood affects others. They remain calm and productive under pressure and cope well with change. My manager stays calm when we’re under the pump.
Managers who value fair treatment will allocate tasks and set schedules keeping in mind people’s capacity and development goals. They acknowledge good work. They build a diverse and inclusive team and encourage diversity of thought. My manager makes sure that my ideas and work are attributed to me.
Managers who foster innovation empower their teams to make decisions – and learn from failures and achievements. They don’t micromanage people. They encourage innovative ideas and approaches and help people to implement them. My manager helps me take my innovative ideas from concept to action.
Managers who are effective help people stay motivated to do their best work. They make the people they manage feel valued and supported. They feel they’re successful when the employees they manage are successful. People willingly recommend them as a good manager. My manager is effective and motivates me to do my best work.
Managers who are results oriented ensure that performance standards are maintained. They work with team members to help remove blockers impeding tasks being completed and help the team get workable outcomes from team meetings. My manager helps me remove or work around things stopping me getting work done.
Managers with the required technical capability add value to their teams. They can roll up their sleeves and work alongside the team when necessary. They empathize with the challenges the team face and have the necessary skills to help devise solutions. My manager has the technical know-how to help our team.
A manager ensures the vision and strategy of the organization is translated into an actionable vision and strategy for the team. They help people understand how their role contributes to the organization’s success. My manager helps us set a clear strategy for achieving our goals.
It’s all very well to identify the traits we want to see in managers, but recruiting people with the traits we’re looking for can be another challenge entirely. Google offers these tips for finding great managers:
If possible, find your own candidates Give candidates a reason to join You may already have standard interview questions. If not, it’s worth taking the time to draw up a standard interview question sheet with follow up questions for interviewing managers.
Tell me about a time your behavior had a positive impact on your team. Follow up with: What was your primary goal and why? How did your teammates respond?
Tell me about a time when you effectively managed your team to achieve a goal. What did your approach look like? Follow up with: What were your targets and how did you meet them as an individual and as a team? How did you adapt your leadership approach for different individuals? What was your key takeaway from this situation?
Many thousands of dollars and hours are spent on employee training each year, but it’s not always easy to quantify its value. Before you start planning training for managers, it’s important to understand how your managers are doing already and where they need support. You may have results from an engagement survey of your organization or even their team – and that could flag leadership as a key driver, which is one data point. To understand where managers excel and where they could improve, conducting a manager effectiveness survey will give you a clear baseline to work from. Team members can provide anonymous feedback to help managers understand how they’re doing. Managers can see where they’re excelling and what areas to focus on for improvement, and at an organizational level you can see what kind of additional training will have the most impact. You’ll also be able to see which managers are strongest in specific areas, so you can get their support to help with training.
In addition to informing training programs, manager effectiveness surveys are also employed during times of rapid growth, when employee feedback indicates that managers lack core capabilities and when there is turnover of employees or managers. The survey results will also inspire thinking about ways to develop managers outside of formal training. Once you’ve decided on areas to focus on, and taken some action to help develop managers, you can do another management survey to measure the impact. “Going from being an individual contributor to a manager can be a big (and scary) leap, and managers need support – not just in the beginning, but as they grow into their own styles and refine their approach over time. Without feedback and guidance on what they can do to improve, managers are left to their own devices to figure things out, often at the expense of the people they manage. It’s getting easier to arm managers with feedback and coaching to boost their ongoing learning and development – and we see the rewards in more engaged managers, and teams, every day,” says Myra Cannon, People Scientist at Culture Amp.
[ Sources: iedp.com, hbr.org, culturearmp.com, ]